§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

§ American Traditions

§ People and Ideas

§ Decline of Western Civilization: a Snapshot

§ Books to Read

§ BUY MY BOOK

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Faith Without Fealty?

True faith is loyalty, or fealty, to truth. Liberalism is loyalty to a secular religious faith that history has demonstrated repeatedly and irrefutably to be false.

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Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. has an opinion piece in the Post’s edition for Tuesday, October 19, 2004; Page A23, with the nicely alliterative title “Faith Without Fealty.” The subhead is “It’s Time to Free Religion From Party Politics”

The opening paragraphs of the article read:

“God is NOT a Republican . . . or a Democrat.”

“That’s the bracing message of a bumper sticker for sale by Sojourners, a progressive Christian magazine. It is turning out to be one of the central themes of the 2004 presidential campaign.

“Voters are not being presented with a choice between faith-based politics and no faith at all. Instead, President Bush and Sen. John Kerry are offering two very different interpretations of what it means for a politician to be religious and, in their cases, Christians.”

The last line above is, to put it politely, a misrepresentation.

John Kerry is at best a nominal Catholic. As a worshipper at the altar of secular socialism, he contravenes one of the most fundamental tenets of the Jewish and Christian spiritual faiths, respect for the sanctity of human life. Like Pontius Pilate, he stands aside and washes his hands when confronted with the legalized murder of babies for nothing more, in the vast majority of cases, than the convenience of men and women who find the birth of a child to be an interference with sexual promiscuity.

As his “not my table” stand on partial-birth abortion reveals, by embracing the secular and materialistic principles of the religion of socialism, he commits himself to the doctrine that there is no such thing as right or wrong, no such thing as moral truth.

Probably the largest number of people who consider themselves to be liberals are the fellow-travelers who subscribe to the avowed aims of socialism, but are ignorant of the core of socialism and its methods of reaching its aims. For a detailed discussion of that point, see Who Are the Liberal-Socialists? and What is Liberalism?.

Christians and socialists say that they want many of the same things: general prosperity and well-being for everyone, stability, harmony, and peace. But their ways of bringing them about are polar opposites. In the long sweep of history, Western civilization’s Judeo-Christian heritage has achieved these objectives to a greater degree than anywhere else at any time. Liberalism, beginning with the French Revolution in 1789, is a history of failure and mass slaughter in which millions of humans have been sacrificed to a secular and materialistic intellectual concept, from the Soviet Union, to National Socialist Germany, to Mao’s China, and Castro’s Cuba.

The great commandments for religious Jews and Christians alike are, “Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord; And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength; this is the first commandment.

“And the second is this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

It will be observed that these commandments are addressed to each individual, as an individual, not as a member of a special interest group. And they place upon each individual the personal responsibility to develop his own moral conscience and to deal with other individuals in a spirit of love and help.

Liberalism, in stark contrast, disavows God and all spiritual religion as ignorance and superstition. MSNBC senior political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell described Christians and religious Jews as simple-minded (see Liberals Sneer at Spiritual Religion and Prayer). President Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote, “The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernist; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority ... between those who believe in science, reason and logic, and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.” (see Liberals Hate Christianity).

Secretary Reich’s identification of liberal-socialism with “the primacy of the individual” illustrates the confusion in public understanding and explains why perfectly decent people support liberalism, albeit out of ignorance. In common with most liberals, Secretary Reich presumes that the aims of socialist intellectuals are necessarily what is in the best interests of individuals. It’s a milder version of the soviet Union’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” in which the will of the secretariat of the Communist party is defined as the will of the people. Here, it is the “nanny state,” in which liberals presume that only they are smart enough to determine what is good for you and that they are therefore entitled to run the government, structuring it to compel you do do what they think is good for you. From this come political-correctness and academic speech-and-behavior-codes, as well as the refusal to appoint Christians and religious Jews to Federal judgeships.

“Individuals” in the NewSpeak, Big Brother lexicon of liberalism means individual hedonistic license, coupled with collective regulation of all assets and economic and political behavior. In our Judeo-Christian heritage, individualism means expecting each person, as an individual, to assume personal responsibility for loving his neighbor as himself and structuring laws and customs that support that faith.

Secretary Reich and Senator Kerry are reading from the same page. Senator Kerry is not a Christian; he is an idolator of socialism.